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The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Blown
Gets
Ways
Waiting
Better
Work
Way
Always
Whistle

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.
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...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
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by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
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I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.
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Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
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So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
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All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
Anne Lamott
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Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
Anne Lamott
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My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.
Anne Lamott
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It's a great time to be alive.
Anne Lamott
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I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you.
Anne Lamott
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If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save they just stand there shining.
Anne Lamott
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Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
Anne Lamott
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Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
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Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.
Anne Lamott
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Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.
Anne Lamott
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I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive it had no spirit. It was fake.
Anne Lamott
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Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
Anne Lamott
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This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.
Anne Lamott